Business intelligence may be understood to be a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information which is used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making for an organization. The primary objective of business intelligence is to facilitate better decision-making. Generally, the process of providing business intelligence data starts with the determination of what kinds of summaries and reports the stakeholders of the organization may be interested in. Usually the stakeholders are queried to determine the types of reports and summaries that they may be interested in. Due to the amount of resources required to effect changes in the types of reports and summaries that are generated, significant care is taken in designing these reports and summaries.
In an organization, the business intelligence is usually used for decision-making in critical areas such as market research, product profitability, inventory tracking, and customer profiling. Implementing business intelligence involves data related to different factors that affect the operations of the organization or business units in the organization, for example, data about customers, competitors and business partners, financial information, details of internal operations, and the like. Typically, business intelligence is implemented through activities such as data sourcing, data warehousing, data analysis, data forecasting, and the like. Different business intelligence solutions are implemented by using technologies provided by products such as SAP™-BW, Oracle™ BI, and Seibel™ Analytics.